It is a quite predictable outcome.
Rather than think up new things to say, this reader comment at ars tech in response to Dave Girard's article says everything quite well:
Quote:
Ask any Mac Pro users where “small size” sits on their list of workstation needs and they will tell you it's down at the bottom, squarely between “should make my bed in the morning” and “covered in fur.”
This, more then anything, is the crux for me. I wanted to sleep on it overnight and see if I felt differently after cooling down and really giving it some thought. Nope, I still hate this design, largely because I just can see absolutely no positive, affirmative argument for it. Having the machine be this small, as the only pro offering, just isn't valuable at all. In the thread discussing the new Mac Pro in the Mac Ach, we did have someone talk about how they really do carry an MP around all over the world on aircraft, and that the current one just barely makes. However, even in that rarified and extreme case, the need could have been met with a case half as big as the old one which still would be 4x the size of this and still allow at least a couple of standard PCIe slots, a decent number of 2.5" drive bays if nothing else, and 8 memory slots. It still would be a smaller, sexier and more portable system, while not utterly and completely gutting it. And that has even more knock-on effects, like creating a requirement for Thunderbolt 2 (more like TB 1.1), which in turn pushes out availability since the Falcon Ridge chipset is due to launch long after IVB-E becomes available (hopefully Apple got some sort of special deal here, otherwise we aren't seeing even this system until December).
For those who don't know, we were really close with the Mac Pro to having across-the-board It Just Works 3rd party graphics card support at long last too. Since around a year ago Nvidia in particular has been fantastic about supporting the Mac, and for 2008 or newer MPs it has been possible to just pop in a 400, 500 or 600 series card (within the limits of heat and power of course). The final missing piece was UEFI, the old Mac Pros used an outdated hybrid EFI 1.1, whereas the UEFI PC graphics cards starting to appear naturally use UEFI (as do Apple's newer non-MP systems). If that had been updated, then we really looking forward to an era of no more "Mac" graphics cards, but just being able to slot in anything. Having that snatched away at the last minute is yet another huge let down.
Pricing has the potential to at least mildly ease the pain, but not much, and even then I don't think the signs are at all hopeful. Apple's approach is fundamentally less efficient and there just isn't much if any cost savings from their design, if anything it's the opposite. Having to use bigger, few DIMMs for memory means paying a lot more money for the same thing. Having to use PCIe SSD internally means paying a lot more for the same thing and not being able to adapt as newer stuff comes out (and the SSD market is moving extremely rapidly right now). If Apple is offering a few normal cards it'd help, but at this point there is every reason to be pessimistic that they'll require workstation cards, charge workstation prices regardless of what deal they're getting privately and pocket the difference.
This really is like the Cube all over again, with the exception that last time everyone was able to just plump for a PowerMac whereas this time Apple seems to have decided the proper solution is to force everyone to get their little sculpture by making it the only offering. It's an answer to a question that no one was asking, and the epitome of form over function. If this was a $1k-$2k middle machine with an upgraded Mac Pro remaining then it'd actually be pretty exciting, but as the dedicated top level replacement it sucks. They've made it more expensive, and however small the main hub is a rat's nest of cables sprouting out from a hub to a bunch of extra boxes is not pretty or portable.
So to my true regret no, I just don't see any positives here. "As small as possible even to the extent of sacrificing core functionality" makes sense in other parts of Apple's lineup, a portable is mostly defined by, well, it's portability, and something like the Mac Mini can actively benefit also. But the best that anyone can argue (and lots of people did argue already) for this system is "well, you can sort of get close to most of the old functionality for a much higher price and in a much less elegant way." That's really too bad.
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http://arstechnica.com/apple/2013/06/a-critical-look-at-the-new-mac-pro/
